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Organization & Environment

DOI: 10.1177/1086026603258926
2003; 16; 413 Organization Environment

Ian Hudson and Mark Hudson
Removing the Veil?:

Commodity Fetishism, Fair Trade, and the Environment

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413

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10.1177/1086026603258926ARTICLEORGANIZATION & ENVIRONMENT / December 2003Hudson, Hudson /

REMOVING THE VEIL?

Articles

REMOVING THE VEIL?
Commodity Fetishism, Fair Trade, and the Environment

IAN HUDSON
University of Manitoba

MARK HUDSON
University of Oregon

For Marx, commodity fetishism is the tendency of people to see the product of their labor in
terms of relationships between things, rather than social relationships between people. In
other words, people view the commodity only in terms of the characteristics of the final prod-
uct while the process through which it was created remains obscured and, therefore, uncon-
sidered. This has crucial implications for our collective ability to see and address the ongo-
ing processes of social and environmental destruction under capitalism. This article
examines one effort to lift the veil obscuring the relations and processes of commodity pro-
duction. Fair trade attempts to make visible the social and environmental relations of pro-
duction and exchange that lie behind the commodity. This assists producers in making a shift
in the qualitative nature of production, particularly in terms of its impacts on producers and
on the environment. The purpose of this article is to determine the extent to which fair trade
can address the problem of commodity fetishism and to identify the barriers it encounters in
attempting to do so.

Keywords: alternative trade; cooperative work places; organic certification; fair-trade
coffee; reification; over consumption

A n important implication of increased commodity production and con-sumption is that people are, more than ever, subject to what Marx
termed commodity fetishism. By this, Marx referred to a phenomenon in which
participants in commodity production and exchange experience and come to
understand their social relations as relations between the products of their labor—
relations between things, rather than relations between people. Today, with the
increasing saturation of daily life by commodities, we are especially subject to this
brand of fetishism.

The small but growing alternative-trade movement represents an initial attempt
to counter the pervasiveness of commodity fetishism, working to make visible and
relevant the social relations that underlie production and exchange. While working

Organization & Environment, Vol. 16 No. 4, December 2003 413-430
DOI: 10.1177/1086026603258926
© 2003 Sage Publications

413

Authors’Note:The authors would like to thank the Canadian Association for Studies in Cooperation for funding the initial research
for this article. We are also very grateful to the following people for their extremely helpful comments: Fletcher Baragar, Robert
Chernomas, Brett Clark, John Bellamy Foster, Mara Fridell, John Loxley, Arteshir Sepheri, and two anonymous reviewers. Any
remaining errors are our own.

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within the arena of commodity production and exchange, alternative trade attempts
to make the relations of production—in terms of labor and its impact on nature—a
visible part of the commodity.

The purpose of this article is to evaluate this movement in terms of its potential
to address the problem of commodity fetishism. The argument to follow is that
commodity fetishism is pervasive and intensifying. This has crucial implications
for our collective abilities to recognize and address the forms of environmental and
social destruction unfolding within the social relations of capitalist production.
Alternative trade attempts to remove the veil obscuring these social relations, and
though it must confront contradictions created by the capitalist organization of pro-
duction and exchange, it offers a starting point for the erosion of commodity
fetishism.

The first section will outline the nature of commodity fetishism, beginning with
Marx’s exposition in volume 1 ofCapitaland building on it to discuss how fetish-
ism works through contemporary markets to conceal the qualitative nature of labor.
Of particular concern here is our declining ability to see and to account for the
impacts of the labor process on producers and the environment. The second section
will outline the process by which alternative trade reveals and makes explicit the
conditions of commodity production, especially their ramifications for producers
and the environment, and will discuss just what conditions of production it is
attempting to foster in one particular example, that of the coffee industry. The third
section evaluates the potential of alternative trade to correct some of the problems
associated with commodity fetishism highlighted in section one and the contra-
dictions it encounters in attempting to do so.

SECTION 1: COMMODITY FETISHISM

In the North, it is becoming a banality to say that the wants and needs of industri-
alized societies are increasingly met through the mechanisms of commodity pro-
duction and exchange. Indeed, the market offers those who enter (and few are those
who refrain from doing so) a bounty of options for so-called needs satisfaction, the
likes of which could never have been dreamt of a century ago. Yet none of it draws
anything but the most fleeting curiosity from the participants of commodity soci-
eties. The commodity has become standard.

The vast majority of mainstream economists would likely agree with Adam
Smith (1904), who claimed, during the early days of the commodity society’s
ascendance, that the prevalence of the commodity form is unproblematic. Indeed,
provided that exchange remains voluntary and that both product and input markets
are functioning smoothly, self-interested rationality is supposed to assure that vol-
untary exchange can be only a win-win situation.1

However, if we move outside of the box constructed by individual-level analy-
sis, it soon becomes clear that the commodity form of need-satisfaction does have
some ramifications worthy of critical evaluation. Marx certainly believed this to be
the case, beginning his entire analysis of capitalism by peeling back the layers of
the commodity. Under its seemingly simple surface, Marx revealed a dual nature—
consisting of both use value and exchange value—and revealed its effects on the
consciousness of those living in its far-flung shadow with the concept of com-
modity fetishism.

Marx’s original discussion of commodity fetishism is an attempt to take the
question of value, originally worked through by the classical economists Smith and

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Ricardo, one step further. Rather than simply asking what about things determined
their ratios of exchange—both answered this with the labor theory of value—Marx
was determined to pose and respond to the question, Why do these things have
value in the first place? Sweezy (1942, p. 27) makes an important distinction
between two different levels of analysis when addressing the question of value.
The quantitative, used by Smith and other classical economists, focuses on the
ratios at which commodities are exchanged. However, Marx argued that there must
also be a qualitative level of analysis in which the specific set of historical relations
behind the commodity form are examined. It is this qualitative notion of value, not
that of the ratios of exchange, on which this article will focus.

Commodity fetishism is the tendency, in a capitalist commodity system, for
social relations between people to appear as a relationship between things (Marx,
1867/1976, p. 164). For example, capital appears to have a life of its own, capable
of commanding a return and hiring and firing labor. However, capital is no more
than the product of labor, organized and exploited through a social relation
between the capitalist and the worker. All commodities appear to trade in relation
with each other, to have an inherent value compared to all other commodities, but
this merely masks the social relations hidden in the production of these commodi-
ties. Therefore, the thing becomes the bearer of value, not the labor that went into
its creation (Geras, 1986, p. 59). This makes it appear as though there exists an
invisible hand of the market that operates according to scientific laws, outside the
realm of human control, when this market is merely the product of human relation-
ships (Sweezy, 1942, p. 36). The organization of production through the purchase
of commodities provides a highly effective mask over the exploitative class rela-
tionships within a capitalist economy. It appears as though all actors in the eco-
nomic system are the owners of a commodity, whether a specific product or an
input into production, and as such, they stand as equals, each with something to sell
in a voluntary exchange (Sweezy, 1942, p. 39).

The phenomenon of commodity fetishism is peculiar to the capitalist system. In
other economic systems, production has been an explicitly social process. By con-
trast, in the capitalist system, in which production is not planned but performed by
the uncoordinated decisions of independent commodity producers, production for
society is organized through the purchase of commodities produced by labor. It is
through this exchange of commodities that labor is regulated in capitalism (Rubin,
1973, p. 7). So those, like Smith and Ricardo, who took value to be something
inherent in the good itself, were, according to Marx, victims of commodity fetish-
ism. “What Adam Smith, in true eighteenth-century style. . . puts before history is
in fact its product” (Marx, 1971, p. 65). In other words, what was a specific product
of capitalism, the bourgeois economists saw as transhistorical. For Marx, the
homogenization of individual, qualitatively different labor in terms of exchange
value is the specific product of capitalist production. Things do not, for Marx,
carry values as an objective characteristic. Value is a social relation “concealed
beneath a material shell” (Marx, 1867/1976, p. 167, note 29).

Although Marx was most concerned with bringing out the specific social rela-
tions that underlay this most basic category of “bourgeois economics,” his com-
ments in the section ofCapital on fetishism hint at some other consequences of
commodity production. Of particular relevance today are Marx’s comments on the
homogenization of qualitatively different labor into so-called abstract labor as it
enters into the arena of commodity exchange, his initial insight into how the com-
modity form acts to conceal social relations, and his description of value acting to

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“transform every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic” (Marx, 1867/1976,
p. 167). These contributions open a door to the critical evaluation both of commod-
ity society and of our efforts to translate the hieroglyphics.

Abstract Labor and the Invisibility of Process

Marx bases much of his analysis of commodity fetishism on the concept of
“abstract labor” (Marx, 1867/1976, p. 166). In the commodity economy, in which
needs are met through exchange in the market, qualitatively different forms of
labor are transformed into homogenous, quantifiable units. Only in this way,
according to Marx, can generalized exchange take place. Although the labor
involved in catching fish, for example, is radically different from that involved in
hunting deer, the very real qualitative differences (specific labor) between the two
must be eradicated in the sphere of exchange. Marx calls this homogenized unit
abstract labor, by which he means the general expenditure of labor power or human
exertion. This is an inevitable reflection of a system in which labor does not have a
permanent specific function, as is the case in many other economic systems. In cap-
italism, labor is required to be highly flexible, not to have a permanent job or skill
but rather to be completely adaptable so that it can be employed in whatever spe-
cific task is currently profitable (Sweezy, 1942, p. 31). As Marx puts it, “The equal-
ization of the most different kinds of labor can be the result only of an abstraction
from their inequalities” (Marx, 1867/1976, p. 73). Only in the capitalist system
does this expended labor take the form of commodities and have the value of its
products.

Just as commodity fetishism affects the members of capitalist society in their
roles as producers, so it impresses on their consciousness through consumption.
Importantly, a person’s role as a producer tremendously influences their activities
as a consumer. In a capitalist commodity economy, it is not only quantitative
exploitation that occurs when the capitalist keeps a portion of the value created by
labor in the form of surplus product. There is also an important qualitative form of
exploitation. Although work is the creative expression of people, when work is
channeled into commodity production, the creative nature of that work is taken by
the capitalist (Perlman, 1973, p. 25). In the absence of any creative, intrinsic reward
for their labor, work becomes a means to an end—consumption—rather than a
means in itself. In a commodity capitalist society, then, work provides neither the
intrinsic creative satisfaction during the process of production nor the fulfillment
of knowing that your particular skills have created a product to fulfill a want or a
need in consumption. Rather, both these sources of satisfaction are destroyed as the
manner in which the goods are produced and the use to which they are put are
removed from the control of the worker. Because the worker has no direct relation-
ship with the consumer and is little concerned with their well-being or even their
satisfaction with the product, it is scarcely surprising that the opposite is also true:
that consumers give little thought to the manner in which the items they consume
are produced. This becomes especially likely as personal satisfaction, denied the
worker on the job, is sought elsewhere, most often in the self-interested pursuit of
satisfaction through ownership of the products of commodity exchange.

In their everyday roles as consumers, people’s experiences with the production
of others is limited to the final product of labor, its quantity, and its price. When ful-
filling wants and needs through the market, the process of production becomes
utterly obscured. The actual producers and their relations to the means of produc-
tion and to nature are made irrelevant, no matter their varied qualities. Grain grown

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by a small farmer using few chemical inputs and working his or her own land is put
into the same market as grain grown by an agro-industrial operation using wage
labor and massive quantities of chemicals. In the process of exchange, the grain,
produced through very different processes, will be evaluated only on the basis of its
characteristics as a final product. If the grain was produced solely for its use value,
the producer and the consumer are one and the same and, therefore, would make a
distinction between the two production processes. To be clear, this is not to say that
consumers do not differentiate on the basis of product quality, only that they are
precluded from differentiating on the basis of the character of the production pro-
cess and its implications for workers and for nature. The social relations of produc-
tion—the ways that people interact with one another and with the environment to
transform nature into human use values—are rendered invisible. The termsocial
hieroglyphiccan be extended from Marx’s original meaning (in which the com-
modity reflects the social relations between the people that produce it and allow for
its exchange) to cover the hidden relations between producers and between
humans and nature that are, in fact, deeply inscribed in each supermarket item.

To sum up, under commodity capitalism, the social, environmental, and histori-
cal relations that go into the production of a commodity are hidden. When a person
wanders through the grocery store or shopping mall, what they see are the charac-
teristics of the commodities themselves—the attractiveness of the packaging, the
cut of the fabric, perhaps the lifestyle associations stapled on by marketing depart-
ments, and, of course, the price. In this sense, the commodity has a life of its own,
completely divorced from the process by which it was created. It becomes not a
result of production on which people have worked under a wide variety of more or
less acceptable conditions but an entity unto itself, with characteristics of its own.

The Intensification of Commodity Fetishism

Two developments have served to further divorce the end product from the pro-
cess by which it was produced: marketing and long-distance trade. Marx argued
that the need for capital to stimulate the demand of workers results in ceaseless
efforts on the part of capital to spur on consumption through sales efforts, provision
of new goods, and creation of new desires. To put it another way, the consumer is
actually alienated from the use value of the product (Burkett, 1999, p. 170). There
has been an extensive literature documenting the remarkable expansion of market-
ing as firms strive to get their message across in a landscape already crowded with
commercial messages (Dawson, 2003; Klein, 2000; McChesney & Foster, 2003).
As McChesney and Foster state, “With the rise to prominence of modern mar-
keting, commercialism—the translation of human relations into commodity
relations—although a phenomenon intrinsic to capitalism, has expanded exponen-
tially” (2003, p. 1). The continuous bombardment of consumers by messages
designed to manipulate their wants and desires creates a public jaded and cynical
about information in general, a problem to which we will return, as it presents a
considerable obstacle for any movement that attempts to convince the population
to actually acquire information about the processes or relations of production.
Commercials also seek to convince the population that the road to personal satis-
faction is paved with commodity consumption. This is an appeal made directly to
an individual’s material self-interest. The constant message is that collective con-
siderations, outside the sphere of commodity consumption, are unimportant. This
creates a population predictably more interested in how their purchases improve

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their own well-being than any considerations about the social and environmental
conditions under which the product was produced.

Only in particularly rare circumstances does advertising contribute to a greater
understanding of the process by which the product was created. In an attempt to
determine the extent to which the process and relations of production appear as part
of the meaning of commodities, one study analyzed the content of television adver-
tisements and concluded that “TV advertising tells us very little about how prod-
ucts are produced.” In fact, only 5.3% of the sample made any mention of the prod-
uct or its history, and this was despite a very generous coding system that permitted
the statement “America’s king of beers since 1883” to count as production infor-
mation (Jhally, Kline, & Leiss, 1985, p. 18).

The second development is the increasing distance between the production and
the consumption of products in the global trading system. Proponents of economic
localization have put forward a critique of long-distance trade largely based on its
devastating environmental impacts. In addition to the obvious problem of trans-
porting goods across the globe given our current reliance on fossil fuels, physical
distance also helps hide environmental impacts of commodity production. If pro-
duction and consumption are in close proximity, a feedback loop is in place that
forces people to live with the environmental consequences of their production and
consumption decisions (Nozick, 1992, p. 62). Long-distance trading relationships
sever this connection, allowing consumers to remain unaffected by many environ-
mental problems that do most of their damage close to the location of production
and oblivious to the harm that escapes the attention of the media. The same argu-
ment can be made, to a slightly lesser degree, about distance and the social relations
of production. When commodities are produced close to where they are sold, as
was much more the case only a few decades ago, the social relations of production
are more likely to be visible. Those that live next to the local garment factory
are much more likely to have some idea about the labor relations that created their
T-shirt than those purchasing commodities involved in the current long-distance
production connections in which corporations subcontract the manufacturing pro-
cess to unknown firms halfway across the world. The rupture of this feedback loop
through the expansion of international trade allows forms of production harmful to
workers and to the environment to persist.

The tendency of long-distance trade to obscure the social and the environmental
conditions of production is reinforced by the rules that govern international trade.
Under the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), it is acceptable for coun-
tries to impose trade restrictions based on problems with the product, but it is not
acceptable to impose restrictions based on the process by which the product is pro-
duced. For example, if a product were a proven health risk to the citizens of an
importing country, it would be acceptable to ban the import of that particular prod-
uct. However, if the product’s production process resulted in undesirable social or
environmental consequences (including those that are health hazards to workers
and citizens in the exporting country), the importing country would not be allowed
to impose import restrictions under WTO rules. An excellent illustration of this
distinction is the recent debate about genetically modified (GM) food. Under WTO
rules, the only basis on which it is valid for a country to restrict GM products is if
the final product has adverse effects, on human health, for example. The impact of
GM food on the environment, or workers producing the food, is ruled out as a legit-
imate basis for trade restrictions. This not only focuses the debate on the character-
istics of the final product itself and further obscures the process by which that prod-

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uct was produced but also actually “constitutionalizes” (Gill, 1998) the invisibility
of process in the international trading regime. To see and account for production
processes has become a sanctionable offense.

It is also worth considering one additional concern about the dominance of
commodity production raised by Bowles (1991). He argues that reliance on the
commodity market to allocate resources has detrimental constitutive effects. Over-
all, reliance on commodity markets results in decreased use of traits that are highly
desirable such as feelings of solidarity, communication with others, and the ability
to make complex decisions. Bowles claims that markets are social settings that fos-
ter certain types of personalities and characteristics and penalize others. This pro-
cess occurs in two areas. First, because the consumer is encouraged to limit his or
her awareness to the commodity itself and not with how it is made or with the wel-
fare of the producer, commodity markets function smoothly even if the people
engaged in the transaction are complete strangers, which, of course, they most
likely are. However, since commodity exchange in a capitalist economy does not
require anything other than the most fleeting personal contact, it fosters anonymity
and makes caring and solidarity unnecessary sentiments. Second, the consumer’s
role in the commodity market is limited to the use of the powers of exit; voice is vir-
tually never used. Unfortunately, exit is a particularly simple and easy option when
compared to voice. The simplicity of commodity exchange can be extended in this
context to apply to the commodity purchasing decision that requires people only to
consider the commodity as a product, as opposed to the commodity as both a prod-
uct and a process. This additional consideration would, of course, create a much
more complex decision for the consumer. However, simplicity is not necessarily
something to be lauded and complexity something to be derided. Rather, Bowles
argues that the simplicity of market transactions contributes to a populace that is
less able to deal with complexity, an important attribute in a well-functioning
democracy. All of these traits are especially important as aspects of functional
democratic communities, where decisions are often complex and, by their very
collective nature, require feelings of solidarity with others. Therefore, empathy for
others and the complex decision-making skills that are both necessary for the
implementation of a functioning democracy are not cultivated when people act
only as self-interested consumers of commodities (Bowles, 1991, p. 16). Com-
modity capitalism, therefore, not only hides the social and the environmental rela-
tions of production but also fosters the development of specific traits, which are not
particularly desirable from a democratic point of view. As we shall see later in this
article, the traits of individualism and of simplicity that are encouraged by the
exchange of commodities are important impediments to a movement that seeks to
encourage a focus on how commodities are produced.

SECTION 2:
ALTERNATIVE TRADE AND COMMODITY FETISHISM

Alternative (or fair) trade is a movement that is attempting to make the social
and the environmental conditions in which commodities are produced a very visi-
ble part of the product. Alternative trade’s primary goal is to improve the liveli-
hoods of low-income producers by increasing the income from their products and
by improving other social conditions such as health and education. This is accom-
plished by attempting to distinguish alternative-trade products from other com-
modities at the retail level by explicitly advertising their conditions of production.

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This is not a completely new idea. In the past, efforts have been made to provide
consumers with some small piece of information about the production process
through the use of labeling. The two most obvious examples are the union-made
and the country of origin labels. In both of these cases, the label was supposed to
identify desirable production traits for which the consumer would have a prefer-
ence. The labels were reinforced by ads imploring consumers to “look for the
union label” and “buy American.” Neither of these schemes carries a great deal of
influence currently, but they certainly provided the inspiration for what could be a
much more ambitious project. Alternative trade is only one of many movements
attempting to resurrect labels as a means to bring production information to the
forefront of the purchasing decision. Labeling projects exist for, among other
things, tuna caught without killing dolphins, lumber harvested in an environmen-
tally responsible fashion, and rugs made without child labor. However, it is not suf-
ficient to define fair trade as a movement that “entails the marketing of products at
greater than free market prices” (Leclair, 2002, p. 949). This definition
underestimates the goals set by fair trade, at least in the case of coffee, which is the
focus of this case study.

Alternative trade, at its most progressive, attempts to extend these relatively
unambitious labeling projects. It is an attempt to dramatically change the relations
of both production and exchange and, crucially, to render the process of production
visible at the point of exchange. Coffee is, perhaps, one of the more ambitious
of the various alternative-trade projects. As such, it is worth spending some time
examining just how the alternative-trade market in coffee seeks to alter the conven-
tional relations of production and exchange.

The first change is in the production of the coffee. To sell coffee under the fair-
trade banner, producers must have their name included in the International Coffee
Producers’ Register (ICR). The ICR is connected to an international fair-trade
umbrella organization called FairTrade Labeling Organizations (FLO) Interna-
tional. To qualify for registration, producer cooperatives, and the farmers which
make up the cooperatives, need to meet several important criteria. Although many
of the measures, such as administrative transparency, are fairly mundane, coopera-
tives must also primarily consist of small-scale producers not dependent on hired
labor and must be democratically controlled by their members. Alternative trade,
in this example, is actually attempting to foster an alternative structure of owner-
ship in the coffee industry, away from larger scale farms with their attendant rela-
tionships between landless laborer and landowner and toward an industry in which
those who produce are those who own. In addition, producers must strive to follow
several general principles or objectives. Among the more radical include reduced
dependency on single cash crops; a commitment to social development through
financing education, health, housing, and water supplies; and the conservation and
sustainable use of natural resources.2

Monitoring of organizations’ compliance with these criteria is performed
through the ICR. Producer groups are asked to submit a questionnaire as a part of
their application, divulging information related to organizational structure and
background, the role of women, decision-making processes, involvement with
social-development projects, farm sizes, pesticide and chemical fertilizer use, and
crop diversity. Annual reports from producers are also made to the registry, con-
tracts between importers and producers are reviewed, as are bank statements show-
ing debits and deposits. Most importantly, a member of the registry will visit the
cooperative to discuss the benefits and obligations of involvement in alternative

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trade and to ensure that the organization does in fact meet the established criteria
(Bob Thompson, personal communication, September 10, 1997).

At the point of exchange between producers and importers, alternative trade
insists on a relationship based on more than the self-interest of both parties.
Importer criteria for participation in a fair-trade labeling scheme are geared at pro-
moting longer, closer relationships between buyers and sellers and making sure
that a greater proportion of the final price reaches the farmer. More specifically,
importers must agree to a number of practices that would be antithetical to a trade
based solely on the principles of self-interest. Importers must purchase coffee
directly and exclusively from small producers’ organizations listed in the produc-
ers’ registry. They must pay a minimum price to the grower, regardless of the cur-
rent world market price. This floor varies depending on the type and the origin of
the coffee but provides a safety net that ensures that costs of production at least will
be recuperated. When the world price rises above the price floor, they must pay a
premium of five cents per pound above the world price for regular coffee and an
additional 15 cents per pound for certified organic. The additional price for organic
reflects additional production costs and higher consumer demand compared with
nonorganic fair trade but also reflects the fact that fair-trade organizations want to
encourage production that improves on social and environmental production pro-
cesses. Importers must also provide up to 60% of the contract value (valued at the
established floor price) as credit to the producer group, to be available at the begin-
ning of the harvest. Finally, importers must establish, in cooperation with the pro-
ducer organization, a long-term and stable relationship in which the rights and
interests of both are mutually respected. No deals are to be made for a period less
than one crop cycle. Long-term arrangements are set out in mutually agreed on and
exchanged letters of intent (Firl, 1996).

The relationship between producers and importers is based on entirely different
principles than those that give rise to commodity fetishism. Importers are inter-
ested not only in the product as a commodity, isolated from the conditions in which
it was produced, but are also equally (or perhaps more) concerned with the produc-
ers themselves, their social relations of production, and the ecological character of
the interactive process of transformation between humans and nature. Alternative
trade thus tries to break down the isolation endemic in commodity society and
begins to differentiate on the basis of production processes rather than (or at least,
in addition to) the characteristics of the final product. At the final point of sale,
alternative trade attempts to increase the visibility of long-term and global eco-
nomic connections involved in day-to-day economic transactions through the edu-
cation of the final consumer. Using histories, descriptions, and pictures of producer
groups, as well as explanations of production processes, fair trade works to rein-
state, at least partially, the information about process that is so lacking in conven-
tional trade. This is an extremely important distinction between conventional and
alternative trade and works to ensure that Northern consumers can choose to avoid
products made under exploitative, dangerous, or ecologically damaging condi-
tions. Fair-trade labeling schemes, such as TransFair, for their part, provide assur-
ances to those consumers too busy or too lazy to check, that goods marketed under
their seal were produced under conditions that comply with a clear set of criteria.

At least in North America, consumers currently do not generally consider the
process by which their purchases are made. In attempting to differentiate between
different kinds of labor—between different qualities of the production process in
terms of human and environmental consequence—the alternative-trade movement

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could play a potentially crucial educational role. In getting people to focus their
attention beyond the commodity on the social and the environmental conditions in
which it was produced, alternative trade could encourage people to identify less as
consumers and more as political actors—as citizens whose agency in the world
ramifies through existing structures to produce specific consequences for other
humans and for nature. This would also foster the values of solidarity, empathy,
and complexity that Bowles finds are atrophying in a society in which commodity
markets are so prevalent. In addition, it is worth noting that in insisting on the
importance of production, alternative-trade organizations dramatically differen-
tiate themselves from other organizations, such as farmers cooperatives, which
practice alternative forms of ownership but compete for consumers solely on the
basis of their product.

Although alternative trade in coffee certainly has the institutions in place to sub-
stantially alter the relations of production, there is no guarantee that good inten-
tions will result in actual benefits for small-scale producers. Because of the very
recent emergence of the alternative-trade movement and the difficulty of collecting
data, there has been precious little work on the extent to which producers lives are
actually changed by alternative trade. However, research based primarily on one,
fairly large, fair-trade cooperative in the Chiapas region in Mexico does seem to
indicate that there is a significant change in the relations of production (Hudson,
1998; Hudson & Hudson, 2002). The impact of alternative trade was evaluated on
economic, social, and environmental grounds. Economically, the producer’s bene-
fit from alternative trade varied considerably depending on market price of non-
fair-trade coffee. When the price in the regular coffee market rose above the fair-
trade minimum, the monetary benefits were relatively small. However, when the
regular price of coffee fell below the fair-trade minimum, the benefits to producers
were much more substantial. The year of 2001 was a particularly disastrous one for
world coffee prices, resulting in dramatic reductions in the incomes of producers
worldwide. The producers of the Majomut cooperative gained an extra $148.00 per
family as a result of selling their coffee through fair trade as opposed to the regular
market.3 This represents a considerable increase in the cash income of small-scale
farmers in Chiapas. The minimum wage for Chiapas in 2000 was 35 pesos per day,
or $1,345 per year. However, only 40% of the population earned more than this
amount. Twenty-two percent earned between $672 and $1,345 and 33% either had
no income or earned less than $672. For agricultural workers in Chiapas, the num-
bers are even lower, with 31% earning between $672 and $1,345 and 54% either
having no income or less than $672.4 In fact, in times of precipitous declines in reg-
ular coffee prices, when producers in the regular market were being forced off their
land and into the local wage-labor market in alarming numbers, those belonging to
the Majomut cooperative were much more successful in maintaining their farms.
In terms of social benefits, cooperative ownership of processing and of marketing
has resulted in an avenue for democratic participation by producers. In addition,
the survival of small-scale, family farms has kept the ownership of production in
the hands of those actually engaged in the activities of production. Owner opera-
tors have considerably more control over the production process than wage labor-
ers, increasing the degree of autonomy in the production process. Environmentally,
a commitment to the shade-grown system and to organic production by the vast
majority of cooperative members has resulted in a much more environmentally
benign system of agriculture than the sun-grown, energy-intensive coffee produc-
tion encouraged by the Mexican state.5 Although it would be premature to make

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any sweeping generalizations based on one case study, in this one example fair
trade does seem to have facilitated a much more socially and environmentally
progressive form of production.6 Crucially, it has been able to do this by explicitly
packaging this so-called alternative production as part of the product.

In the sphere of exchange, at both the retail and importer levels, the entire pro-
cess is designed to illuminate, rather than obscure, the process by which the com-
modity is produced. Further, the production process itself, with its emphasis on
small-scale, owner-operated farms, cooperative ownership, and environmentally
benign production is a dramatic break from the usual capitalist relations of produc-
tion. However, these conclusions are specific to alternative trade in coffee under the
FLO. Other labeling projects attempting to highlight production characteristics,
such as organic, with much less ambitious agendas offer consumers a more com-
modified version of an alternative that could limit the expansion of alternative
trade. Indeed, the alternative-trade movement stands at something of a crossroads,
and the extent to which it develops as a movement that acts to counter the tendency
to commodity fetishism or indeed whether it even attempts to do so (as it has in cof-
fee) is very much an open question (see Hudson, 1998; Hudson & Hudson, 2002).

SECTION 3:
THE POTENTIAL (AND LIMITS) OF ALTERNATIVE TRADE

As we have seen in the coffee case study, alternative trade has significant poten-
tial as a means of peeling back the veil that shrouds commodity production. How-
ever, there are a number of issues that constrain or threaten the movement. Most
obviously, it must successfully expand to become a more visible force on the politi-
cal and economic landscape. Equally but less obviously important, it also faces a
dilution problem as it faces competition from other labeling projects attempting to
force their particular production issue into the consciousness of the consumer.

Estimates from the Fair Trade Federation claim that fair-trade products repre-
sent a very meager .01% of the goods exported worldwide.7 They have, however,
been growing quite rapidly. Alternative Trade Organization sales doubled over the
5 years prior to 1991 (Paul Leatherman, personal communication, September,
1997) and they are growing at a more moderate pace of about 5% per year today.8

According to TransFair USA, the organization that certifies fair-trade coffee in the
United States as part of the FLO, the market share of fair-trade coffee is 5% in Swit-
zerland and 2.5% in Holland, the two countries with the highest degree of market
penetration in 2001. Although the share of fair-trade coffee in the United States’
market is much smaller (about 0.35%) it has grown very rapidly in the last few
years, from 2 million pounds in 1999 to 7 million pounds in 2001.9

The very limited market for fair-trade coffee in the developed world has created
a considerable gap between the eagerness of suppliers to sell their product under
the fair-trade banner and the willingness of consumers to pay the higher retail
price. Worldwide, in 1999, fair-trade cooperatives produced 60 million pounds
of coffee but only sold 30 million pounds.10 The remaining beans are sold on the
regular market. The fact that only 50% of the alternative-trade coffee produced is
actually sold for the fair-trade price is clearly a substantial impediment to the
movement.

Alternative trade can only become a genuinely transformative movement if it
reaches a much broader segment of the population. However, there are some very
important challenges that will have to be overcome for this to occur. The most

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important is a change in consumer attitudes toward commodity purchasing. A
1997 report concerning consumer attitudes for certified wood in the United States
sheds some light on market potential for fair trade in North America. In the sum-
mary of general consumer attitudes, the report stated that

it is not part of (North American consumers’) context to think about how the wood
as a raw material is harvested, where it comes from, or whether there could be a
better way. . . . Consumers also have a “hear no evil, see no evil” mentality.11

In other words, consumers suffer from commodity fetishism. It would appear as
though one of the obstacles to a movement attempting to erode the pervasiveness of
commodity fetishism is the tendency of the populace to fetishize commodities. In
keeping with Bowles (1991), we would also argue that the constituent effects of
commodity markets reinforce this tendency by encouraging individualistic and
simple decision making whereas alternative trade requires a much more compli-
cated and solidaristic thought process. This calls our attention to an important con-
tradiction within fair trade’s efforts to erode the fetishism of commodities. That is,
if we are to take Marx’s materialism seriously, we must reckon with the idea that,
although the process of consumption (with its attendant advertising and marketing)
has become a powerful influence on human consciousness, the roots of commodity
fetishism lie, at least to some extent, outside of the scope of fair trade’s influence
over Northern consumers. Marx locates the roots of commodity fetishism not in the
sphere of exchange, where the Northern consumer encounters fair trade, but in the
sphere of production. If the day-to-day experiences of Northern consumers are
themselves those of alienation from the products and the processes of production,
then it comes as little surprise that their ability to overcome commodity fetishism is
limited. To the degree that the consciousness of the North American or European
consumer is conditioned by his or her own relations of production—relations that
fair trade cannot directly reach—the movement encounters a constraint to its
growth and its effectiveness that it cannot address on its own. This can be seen as a
contradiction if we look only at fair trade in isolation (or if fair trade isolates itself
in practice) from other progressive movements, particularly those that attempt to
politicize productive relations in the North. If on the other hand, it is considered
(and its proponents and practitioners consider it) as a single element in a broader
movement to build a progressive transnational politics aimed at transforming the
relations of production globally, fair trade can be understood as occupying a partic-
ularly strategic position. It has worked to establish transnational networks of soli-
darity between progressive political elements in the North and southern workers
and is attempting to initiate a radical questioning of the dominant system of inter-
national trade.

In addition to alluding to the problem of commodity fetishism, the above-
mentioned analysis of consumer attitudes reports a general distrust of labels prom-
ising environmental friendliness, given the manipulative nature of commodity
advertising and packaging (MacWilliams Cosgrove Smith Robinson, 1997). This
is especially problematic for a movement that essentially seeks to get consumers to
incorporate elements of the production process into their purchasing decision. If
consumers view the information as unreliable, then they will be understandably
reluctant to make purchases on this basis. The problem becomes one of competing
labels, with the legitimate fair-trade labels competing with labels from less authen-
tic organizations that, nonetheless, claim to represent the same ideals. With the cur-
rent debates surrounding the reliability of a proliferation of labels, from dolphin

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friendly to organic to GM free, it is scarcely surprising that consumers are a little
skeptical, often correctly so, about the informational legitimacy of a label stuck on
a package. For example, a Dole Foods subsidiary has been recently charged with
selling conventionally produced bananas as organic to take advantage of the price
premium (Raynolds, 2000, p. 305).

Even when outright fraud is not being practiced, deception often is. Based on
the promises made on the Nike website about how their shoes are manufactured
and on the statements on the site of TransFair USA about the requirements for fair-
trade certification, identifying which is Nike and which is TransFair is not quite as
simple as one would expect (see Table 1).

The actual conditions of production and exchange fostered by Nike and
TransFair USA could scarcely be further apart. However, this difference is very dif-
ficult to detect from the information provided about their respective production
practices. Those well versed in these issues would most likely have identified the
two companies based on TransFair’s (company B’s) insistence on cooperative
workplaces as opposed to Nike’s (company A’s) right to free association, but a
casual observer could certainly be excused for thinking there was little difference
between the two. Unreliable information presents two sizeable obstacles for alter-
native trade. On one hand, those who do attempt to participate may be misled by the
progressive language used by less than progressive organizations. On the other,
people could well come to distrust the production information that defines the
alternative-trade movement as it becomes indistinguishable from the claims made
by a wide variety of other organizations, making people less willing to participate.

In addition to the problem of unreliable production information, as alternative
trade’s popularity has grown, it has come into competition with other labeling
projects, each with their own particular concern about the production process. It
is possible that alternative trade and other movements (organic, for example)
may be seen by consumers as a homogeneous group of organizations that occupy
the so-called good production niche. Bananas provide an excellent example of the
potential for consumer confusion involving environmentally friendly or fair-trade
labeling. The Rainforest Alliance uses “ECO-OK” and “Better Banana” labels to
signify to consumers those bananas that are produced in a manner that will protect
the rainforests in which they are harvested. As of 1998, 20,000 of the 35,000 hec-
tares certified under these programs were owned by Chiquita Brands International.
Although this was very much in keeping with the Rainforest Alliance’s political
strategy of constructive engagement with the corporate community as a means of
getting the quickest (and it argues the most successful) results from its lobbying

Hudson, Hudson / REMOVING THE VEIL? 425

Table 1: Statements Made on Nike and TransFair USA Websites

Company A Company B

Management practices that respect the rights of all employ-
ees, including the right to free association and collective
bargaining

Minimizing our impact on the environment
Providing a safe and healthy work place
Promoting the health and well-being of all employees

Fair prices
Cooperative workplaces
Consumer education
Environmental sustainability
Financial and technical support
Respect for cultural identity
Public accountabilitya

Note: Company A = Nike; Company B = TransFair USA.
a. See http://www.nike.com/nikebiz/nikebiz.jhtml?page=25&cat=compliance&subcat=code and http://
www.transfairusa.org/why/fairtrade/html.

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activity, there remain some fairly large questions about just what requirements
must be met to get the alliances’seal of environmental approval. For example, there
appears to be very little in the way of social (as opposed to environmental) criteria
other than a very vague commitment to ensure fair treatment and good conditions
for workers. This creates a clash between the alliances’label and that of fair traders,
who also market their own bananas with a more stringent social code. After the alli-
ance started selling its bananas in Europe, sales of fair-trade bananas dropped from
8,000 boxes to 400 boxes at the largest Danish retailer, FDB (Murray & Raynolds,
2000, p. 71). FDB clearly felt that it could use the alliances’ label to replace the fair-
trade bananas in the conscientious-consumer niche. Both labels are authentic in
that the products genuinely reflect what is claimed for them in their labeling. How-
ever, the more ambitious, progressive label is being forced out by its less ambi-
tious rival. This will be a problem endemic to the fair-trade movement, especially
because less ambitious labeling projects are likely to be less expensive. For exam-
ple, coffee that is merely certified organic is cheaper to produce than that that is
both organic and fair trade, as there is no social code for organic production. In
attempting to alter the relations of production and of exchange through the act of
consumption, fair-trade organizations face an important information asymmetry
problem in that the consumers are far less likely to know what, exactly, lies behind
each label than the producers.

According to Josee Johnston (2002), the difficulties mentioned above are some-
what inevitable for a movement that focuses its efforts on the individual in his or
her role as a consumer. Although sympathetic to the goals of the alternative trade,
Johnston is pessimistic about its ability to create a counter-hegemonic discourse
due to its reliance on the hegemonic tools of individual consumption activity as an
agent of change. This creates three specific problems. First, relying on individual-
istic notions of choice and consumer sovereignty rests on the dominant idea that the
market is an avenue for democratic expression that is, in many ways, superior to the
political arena. Thus, protest can be more successfully pursued through the market,
simply by consuming correct items, than by using more collective political means.
This is problematic given that the very structures that have created the inequality
are, indeed, political and require collective action. This narrow, individualistic
channel for fostering change is inevitably ripe for the type of corporate cooption
that we have mentioned previously. It also overlooks the crucial fact that in a mar-
ket, not everyone has an equal number of votes or dollars, making fair trade a con-
sumer movement of the reasonably wealthy. Second, it obscures the structural link-
ages between the core and the periphery. The exchange relationship between the
developed-world consumer and the developing-world producer is presented as one
of equals. The conditions of southern producers are glossed over on the shiny pages
of fair-trade catalogues. After all, the object of fair trade is to induce sales, not to
make potential consumers uncomfortable. Finally, Johnston argues that fair trade
neglects the environmental problems of overconsumption in the developed world,
giving people the false impression that they can, in fact, improve environmental
and social conditions by consuming differently, ignoring the crucial debate about
the necessity of lifestyle changes by the overconsuming North.

Johnston provides a telling critique of the less ambitious fair-trade projects that
narrowly focus on the sphere of exchange through obtaining a so-called just price.
Although these tendencies are certainly present in our case study, coffee under the
FLO banner also has the potential to act as what Johnston describes as a counter-
hegemonic example precisely because of its insistence on a transformation in the

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social and the environmental relations of production. Although it is true that fair
trade reaches Northern consumers only in the sphere of exchange, this does not
necessarily mean that it cannot start to foster a discussion about the conditions in
which goods are produced that moves well beyond placating the guilty conscience
of the well-to-do. The FLO’s very visible commitment to owner-operated farms,
cooperatives, and organic, shade-grown coffee as a dramatic improvement over
those that are large scale, capitalist, energy intensive, and sun grown could foster
discussion about the social and the environmental problems associated with capi-
talist production relations. Fair-trade coffee does have the potential to function as a
counter-hegemonic discourse, although, as both we (and Johnston) have pointed
out, this is far from inevitable given the demonstrated ability of capital to co-opt
consumer movements.

To overcome the commodity fetishism so entrenched in society, alternative
trade must resolve the issues of information reliability and distinguish itself from
less radical attempts to alter the relations of production. The answer, of course, is in
providing as much information as possible at the original point of purchase and
then attempting to follow up with more information if it is requested. Only by pro-
viding a genuine, reliable flow of information linking the consumer to the social,
economic, and ecological context of the producer can the feedback loop so vital to
compatibility between economies and ecosystems be simulated. It is only in fulfill-
ing the potential of its pedagogical function that alternative trade might break out
of its limited, current role as a feel-good conscience cleanser for the well-to-do
Northern consumer. Rather than letting people feel that they are doing their part for
the good of the world, the information and the education provided through alter-
native trade needs to use the product as a gateway to exploring all of the social,
environmental, and economic dimensions of production and consumption.

CONCLUSION

Whereas both Marx and Smith felt that the true value of commodities was hid-
den by exchange in a monetized economy, only Marx identified this as a problem,
as he felt that what has being hidden was an exploitative relationship between
social classes. As consumer culture adds additional layers of meaning on to com-
modities and the physical distance between production and consumption is in-
creased, the veil that shrouds both social and environmental conditions has become
all the more impenetrable. Indeed, the very traits of individualism and simplicity
promoted by commodity markets actually reinforce the tendency toward commod-
ity fetishism. However, the alternative or fair-trade movement is attempting to
explicitly include the conditions of production as part of the characteristics of the
commodity. Whereas conventional commodity exchange grinds down differences
in the process of production to equate units of labor, fair trade attempts the oppo-
site, presenting as unequal what is unequal—the qualities of the labor process and
human transformations of nature. Although the extent of the change sought in the
production process varies widely between different organizations in the labeling
movement, from dolphin friendly to cooperative ownership, they all seek to correct
a problematic production characteristic by educating consumers about the problem
and then offering commodities with a visible indicator of their improved produc-
tion process. Coffee is perhaps one of the most ambitious fair-trade projects in
terms of the extent of the change it is attempting to make. The FLO for coffee
insists on family operated, cooperatively owned, environmentally responsible con-

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ditions of production—a dramatic break from the current capitalist, social, and
environmental relations of production. Although this example does, in fact, appear
to have some potential to counteract the tendency toward commodity fetishism
inherent in commodity exchange, there are some important obstacles that may pre-
vent alternative trade, as a movement, from realizing this potential. The most obvi-
ous is that it must reach a much larger segment of the population despite the diffi-
culty in overcoming consumers’ current tendencies to ignore production relations
and their well-placed skepticism about the legitimacy of informational packaging.
Paradoxically fair trade’s ability to reach a larger consumer base is limited by the
prevalence of commodity fetishism among Northern consumers. If commodity
fetishism is a result of productive relations, then we cannot expect Northern con-
sumer consciousness to change dramatically in the absence of transformed rela-
tions of production in the North. Lastly, the competition between more and less
ambitious fair-trade alternatives could result in the crowding out of the more pro-
gressive projects, as consumers may not fully appreciate the distinction between
the various alternative trade labels, lumping them all under the homogeneous ban-
ner of progressive production. Alternative trade is most definitely a fledgling
movement and there remain some very real questions about its potential to grow
without compromising its more radical characteristics. However, at least in the
case of coffee, it provides a much-needed antidote to the cult of the commodity that
currently dominates society, not only by encouraging consumers to consider the
production process of commodities but also by fostering a genuinely transforma-
tive alternative form of production in the South

NOTES

1. We leave aside the important question of whether exchange on the labor market can
appropriately be called voluntary, and if so, to what degree its voluntariness is asymmetri-
cally distributed between the demand and the supply sides of the market.

2. Max Havelaar TransFair Fairtrade.Criteria and Conditions for Coffee. Unpublished
report.

3. Calculated from the following information (Trejo, 2002):

Total exports (pounds) 1,235,000
Fair-trade exports (pounds) 741,000
Fair-trade premium (U.S.$ per pound) 0.3
Number of members 1,500
Average income benefit per member (U.S.$) 148.2

4. XII Censo General De Poblacion y Vivienda 2000. Retrieved from http://www.
inegi.gob.mx/difusion/ingles/fpobla.html.

5. Sun-grown varieties do offer considerable income benefits for farmers, allowing
them to plant anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 plants per hectare, whereas shade systems
allow only 1,000 to 3,000 plants. In addition, sun-grown plants produce more cherries per
tree due to higher photosynthetic rates. However, because they eliminate all of the shade
trees from the system, they reduce the diversity of the agro-ecosystem considerably. They
also require greatly increased levels of chemical inputs. Researchers (Greenberg, 1994, p.
25) have found that, whereas traditional shade systems in Chiapas support at least 180 spe-
cies of birds (an amount exceeded only by so-called undisturbed tropical forest), sun-grown
plantations support 90% fewer (Smithsonian, 1994). According to Nolasco (1985) “the
agroecosystem of the coffee farm which uses different shade trees, combined with fruit trees
and coffee bushes, simulates the conditions of natural ecosystems, combines different vege-
table species of high productivity, and does not degrade the soil” (p. 425). Another study

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found that the number of ants, beetles, wasps, and spiders on a single tree species in a shade-
grown farm is equal to that of a single tree species in an undisturbed tropical forest (Janssen,
1997).

6. One other analysis of which we are aware (Ronchi, 2002) supports the generally pos-
itive conclusions of our own research concerning the impact of fair trade on the livelihoods
of coffee farmers.

7. Fair Trade Federation.Fair Trade Facts. Retrieved June, 2003, from http://www.
fairtradefederation.com/ab_facts.html.

8. Current sales and growth rate from European Fair Trade Association Yearbook,
1997.Campaigning for Fair Trade.

9. TransFair USA (2002).Action Guide.
10. Organic Consumers Association.Fair Trade Coffee: Coming to a Café Near You.

Retrieved from http://www.organicconsumers.org/starbucks/coffback.htm#100.
11. MacWilliams Cosgrove Smith Robinson (1997).Messages and Communications

Strategies for Certified Wood and Sustainable Forestry in the United States. Unpublished
report.

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Ian Hudson is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Manitoba. His
areas of research include political economy, sustainable development, and the economics of sports.

Mark Hudson is pursuing his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Oregon and holds a master’s in
environmental studies from York University. His areas of research include political economy, Marxist
theory, and environmental sociology.

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